model on the two types of gentile structures demonstrates a great level of similarity to Anthony D. Smith's differenti - ation between lateral and demotic ethnic groups two decades later (Smith, National identity, 1991). This possibly indi- cates that Szűcs cannot be squeezed into any existing school of nationalism studies. Instead, he shares some features of ethnosymbolism as well, despite the intention of the editors at Central European University and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences to portray him as a reliable point of orientation “stressing the discontinuity between premodern and modern frames of identification” (p. 22). Baker's work seeks to orientate studies of the Balkans around the idea of “race”—a notion that seems for her to “… almost always pass over the east of Europe and its state socialist past” (1). In so doing, the author hopes to integrate what was once Yugoslavia into discussions of “global ‘raciality’” (p. 1). This is a commendable and timely effort, for postsocialist area studies is certainly ripe for its own “postcolonial turn” (see Laffey & Nadarajah, 2016). And while I do not believe Baker's work is always successful in deconstructing the very narratives she is critical of, the book's enduring achievement will likely be its to bringing to the mainstream these difficult topics. Over four chapters Baker deftly introduces readers to key concepts like eurocentrism, whiteness, and coloniality to show how the Balkans was never immune from the racist and imperialist tendencies spawned by their Christian European brethren to the north-west. Her focus is a self-professed effort to shift away from the plethora of studies on the Balkans that explore the region through concepts like ethnicity and religion, something Baker argues fails to adequately to attend to this very entanglement with European imperialism. These themes are developed in the first chapter exploring the ways in which studying popular music can enhance our understanding of how racial imaginaries are spread, shift and shape local dynamics. There is much to be gained here for students of social and cultural production. The second chapter more heavily focuses on history and includes the intriguing case of Ulcinj's (Albanian: Ulqin) Afro-Albanians (pp. 74–79). The third chapter connects the USSR, Yugoslavia and the latter's integration into the Non-Aligned Movement to show how “ambiguous racial formation in the Yugoslav region” functioned in the twentieth century (p. 119). The following chapter explores how all this functioned in the postsocialist period and the region's entanglement with things like European border controls and nation-making. The book is successful in showing how race has persisted in the Balkans as a topic of debate and its side-lining by prominent English language studies in the field. This much is clear. My worry with the book is its unclear presentation of the intersection between race and religion. As Rexhepi (2018a, 2018b) has written extensively about, “race” in the Balkans can never be separated from religion when it concerns (especially) the experiences of Muslims here. Baker's Race and the Yugoslav region: Postsocialist, post-conflict, postcolonial? Catherine Baker, Manchester University Press, 2018, pp. 256, £26.00 (pbk) Behar Sadriu Department of Political Science, UCL, London, UK Email: behar.sadriu.11@ucl.ac.uk DOI: 10.1111/nana.12919 © 2023 Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. BOOK REVIEWS 390 14698129, 2023, 1, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nana.12919 by <Shibboleth>-member@ucl.ac.uk, Wiley Online Library on [27/01/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License